Trumpcare dead!? GOP has lost two more votes! Open Thread

@AngryWarthogBreath
I do get a kick out of it when the X-ray techs practically high-five me over the rod in my leg. It’s cute when they geek out. 🙂

Forgive me if I withhold my enthusiasm, but Republicans are pretty much still in office and able to cause a lot of damage.

Earlier this year, after Trump took office, a close relative of mine had to perform a back alley abortion on herself because Republicans basically defunded Planned Parenthood and she didn’t have the money to pay for the procedure.

Despite the fact that she was on her 6th week of pregnancy, despite the fact that she was within the legal terms, despite the fact that abortion is legal she had to risk her life to get the procedure done, solely because these evil assholes believe they’re entitled to control women’s reproductive choices. She spent two days in agonizing pain over this and was unable to go to the clinic due to healthcare costs alone.

So, while I’m happy their initiative failed, I’m not going to blink until they’re gone entirely, because one of the most salient points of modern conservatism is the disingenuous and deceitful means in which they enact policy.

Would anybody mind posting the real link referenced by https://t.co/4hAUAAmYTE – Twitter links are filtered at work.

Well, that’s a relief. Though I still can’t help but feel that Mitch McConnell is still too dense to understand that most actual voters won’t actually support the GOP’s attempts to take away healthcare from millions of Americans just to pay for a tax cut for the 1% (though, considering what we know about ol’ Mitch, he was never exactly a bastion of self-awareness in the first place.)
But do you wanna know what really gets me? The thing is, to my understanding, Republicans only hate Obamacare because of the guy who passed it. Though I won’t pretend to even remotely understand how health insurance even works, the research I’ve done on the subject shows that, all in all, Obamacare does lean more toward conservative ideas. Seriously, if Saint Reagan passed the ACA in the 80s, the GOP would be fighting tooth and nail to defend it, but the president who started it wasn’t a white Republican, so (to quote Ben Carson) it’s worse than slavery/the Holocaust/9-11/whatever.

Christ why is your country’s government full of turds? I really hope the best for you all. If you need someone to put in a good word if you want to move to Canada let me know…

Why is McConnell still doggedly going forward with an unpopular course of action, when he KNOWS just how low Trump’s approval rating is and how easily he could lose his razor-thin Senate majority in 2018?

I believe the answer to your question is “Election Integrity Commission.”

I do get a kick out of it when the X-ray techs practically high-five me over the rod in my leg. It’s cute when they geek out.

So are X-ray techs always secretly hoping that you, like, swallowed 15 golf balls or something? Do they just LIVE for that moment when someone has something really weird inside them?

The number of people losing insurance is only a problem if voters figure it out. And then the GOP will still find some way to scare people into voting for the Eating Peoples Faces Off Party (“*those* politicians want to treat *humans* as if they were *people*” and then BAM election victory, because the other politicians are too afraid of insulting anyone by having a stand on anything).

@Katz:

So are X-ray techs always secretly hoping that you, like, swallowed 15 golf balls or something? Do they just LIVE for that moment when someone has something really weird inside them?

I once did a temp job as a the guy who reads complaints letters for an airline. We had an informal office contest for the weirdest lost luggage. My personal high scores were a) four military marksman rifles and 800 rounds of ammunition, and b) 14 boxes of high-impact plastic car parts, each one weighing 23 kg.

It would not surprise me if X-ray technicians were the same.

Regarding the Republicans, there’s a picture that comes to mind but I suspect it might violate standards here.

Arctic Ape: Hissss.

Regarding the Senate, Republicans will almost certainly pick up seats in 2018 — there are 25 Dem seats up for election and only 9 Reps. There are several Dems up in majority Rep states, and only one Rep who seems to be in any trouble (Heller in Nevada). The chances of the Dems picking up 3 seats (so as to get a majority, because Pence is the tiebreaker if it’s 50-50) are infinitesimal.

The oddity of the way the Senate works is that people who are elected in a Presidential election year come up for re-election in a midterm year, and vice versa. The midterm years feature a much older, whiter, and more conservative electorate. The result is that the Dems up for re-election this year were elected in 2012 with the Obama tailwinds.

McConnell is probably thinking that passing Obamacare repeal now but making it effective after the 2018 midterms will not hurt his chances of getting more Rep Senators.

The thing is, even if none of the Trumpcare clusterfucks pass, they can still kill Obamacare by refusing to pay the subsidies, which will force the rest of the insurance companies out of the exchanges. (Repeal of Obamacare without replacement would do the same thing.)

Yes, Obamacare was originally a Republican program (or at least an attempt to defeat Hillarycare), and the Reps are only against it because they wanted to use it as a political cudgel against the Dems. But they spent 7 years labelling it a monstrous abomination and promising to repeal it, and if they don’t a large part of their base will be angry at them. The Rep senators are afraid that they will be primaried from the right if they don’t go along and their opponent will have huge amounts of Kochite money. That is why so many of the opponents of repeal and replace are so far right that there’s no space for an even farther right opponent.

Twice now (1994 and 2010) Reps have been able to use opposition to Dem health insurance bills to make big gains in Congress, and they still think that any steps away from universal coverage will gain them votes. So far, it has worked.

@mildly

While I don’t subscribe to alternative medicine, and my first port of call is always a GP, sometimes natural products can be surprisingly effective. My mum took wild yam tablets and her menopause symptoms got much, much easier. I don’t have a very good digestive system but I’ve been helping that with ginger root tablets and some strong probiotics. Makes a real difference, for me.

Not related, but still political, a local story from my city seems to be going national.

http://kstp.com/news/mohamed-noor-officer-involved-shooting-justine-diamond-fatal-minneapolis-shooting/4544324/

I wonder if it will finally cause police shootings to be taken seriously now that the victim is a white woman and the officer is a Muslim and a man of color? I’m not sure what would depress me more, if the race reversal causes people to suddenly care or if nothing happens yet again, proving that the police are will never have any accountability.

I don’t say it often because I don’t want to come off all what about the white people, but I always feel uncomfortable when cops are near. Even knowing that I’m of a demographic that’s the most unlikely to be targeted for police violence (white cishet and mainstream middle class looking), it just felt like the more we militarize police forces and the more we fail to hold them accountable when they hurt or kill civilians, the more likely that they wouldn’t be satisfied only targeted marginalized populations. It doesn’t feel particularly good to be right.